On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 1:17 PM, Pete Lancashire <pete at petelancashire.com> wrote: They are useful on low-end systems, like an RT-11 machine when you don't have some form of hard drive (RQDXn + RD5x or RL(V)11 + RL01 or RL02, etc...) If you have a PDP-11 with a hard drive, they can be handy for trading files with another machine with an RX02, but if you don't need 8" floppies, and you have another option, they aren't essential. As you have already experienced, there are plenty of machines that don't/didn't have them. At one point, they were an obvious choice for a small machine. Unless you are dead set on a 100% DEC box, I think there are plenty of options that don't involve floppies. One inexpensive one is TU58 emulation (via PC-based or microcontroller-based tape emulator + one spare serial port on your PDP-11, easy in the Qbus world because the DLV11J is cheap and plentiful) If you want a 100% authentic machine, there are lots of configurations that would include an RX02. Oh... and if you want to also dabble with the PDP-8, the same RX02 would be useful on an RX8E, and that was a very ordinary PDP-8 configuration (and much easier to put together than a hard-disk-based machine, because there are fewer options there). -ethan

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 12:17 PM, Pete Lancashire <pete at petelancashire.com> wrote: If you don't need it, I could certainly use a clean RX02 for $150! :) -- Ben Sinclair ben at bensinclair.com